Bøger udgivet af Walther Konig Verlag

Inspired by visits to Asian countries under dictatorship, A Question of Evidence examines the inroads artists can make into the status of political documents. Most of the contributing artists collaborate with grassroots collectives that manage to conduct research and disseminate information through Internet-based networks, video and film databases.

Troubled Waters is the title of a 15-part photo series by William Eggleston. In addition to Eggleston's work, this volume presents photographic still lifes by such artists as Thomas Demand, Dan Graham, Sigmar Polke, Jorg Sasse and Michael Schmidt, among others.

In her essay "Writing Turned Image: An Alphabet of Pensive Language," Sabine Folie writes, "An idea...explored in Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de dés (A roll of the dice) of 1897 has in the twentieth century become an integral part of the poetological and, more generally, the avant-gardist vocabulary: the idea of unmasking language as a convention whose purpose it is to discipline the individual and to subject it to a regulated system of capitalist exploitation as well as to guarantee orientation in the world... Writing was released from the textual ensemble of the book and integrated into the flow of its media--as a disturbance, a deconstruction of meaning." The ideas of Symbolist poet and galvanizing nineteenth-century intellectual Stéphane Mallarmé are discussed in this text-heavy volume in relation to works by Robert Barry, Lothar Baumgarten, Marcel Broodthaers, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Rodney Graham, among others. Scholarly essays by Sabine Folie, Anna Sigridur Arnar, Jacques Rancière, Gabriele Mackert and Michael Newman accompany a generous selection of images by each of the artists.

The mechanisms, rhetoric and strategies of today's art world are probably closer to popular conceptions of the film industry than to the romantic image of the solitary studio-bound artist--so byzantine are the relations between artists, collectors and critics that sit just behind the artwork itself, propping it up, so to speak. The artists in The Making of Art show and trace these structures, offering some transparency as to how this world--so foreign and remote to many of us--really operates. Artists contributing to this elucidation are Pawel Althamer, Azorro, Tami Ben-Tor, Joseph Beuys, Merlin Carpenter, Clegg & Guttmann, Phil Collins, Tracey Emin, Fischli & Weiss, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jörg Immendorff, Komar & Melamid, Sean Landers, Louise Lawler, Manuel Ocampo, Martin Parr, Sigmar Polke, Cherí Samba, Nedko Solakov, Wolfgang Tillmans and John Waters.

The abstractions of Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris (born 1969) employ an iconography of fragmented and splintered abstract shapes. Southafternoon (the title derives from a song on Roberto Cacciapaglia's The Ann Steel Album, and also references the light in Morris' studio) presents 12 paintings from 2009-13.

Presenting recent work by Gerwald Rockenschaub, born in 1952 in Vienna, Swing features sculptures, paintings and digital works by this renowned pioneer of the crossover between Minimalism and Pop, design and club culture.

After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichy, born in 1926 in the former Czechoslovakia, withdrew to a life of isolation in his hometown of Kyjov. In the late 1950s, he stopped painting and, during his daily walks, began to take photographs of women with cameras he made by hand. He mounted his prints on handmade frames and added finishing touches in pencil, shifting from photography to drawing. Disregarding the rules of photography, for four decades Tichy created a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of female beauty. A former neighbor, Roman Buxbaum, discovered Tichy's hidden work in the 1980s and has been documenting and collecting it ever since. In 2004, the esteemed international curator Harald Szeemann mounted the first solo exhibition of the nearly 80-year-old artist. That same year, Tichy was given the Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Discovery Award and the Kunsthaus Zurich organized a large retrospective. Solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) Frankfurt followed in 2008. Tichy does not see his exhibitions, for he no longer leaves his house. This beautifully produced, thorough volume collects the work--perfectly.

Berlin-based Andreas Hofer borrows from American comic strips, German art and architectural products from the Nazi era, the paintings of Kazimir Malevich, prehistoric dinosaur imagery, science fiction and pre-Modern worship images. He is represented in New York by Metro Pictures and in Los Angeles by Hauser & Wirth. Herein, recent work.

The official anthem of the European Union, heard at numerous political, cultural and public sporting events, is the "Ode to Joy" melody from the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, "a true 'empty signifier' that can stand for anything," begins noted theorist Slavoj Zizek in his essay for this well-designed artist's book in which the American and Cuban Conceptual artist collaborators Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla present their reflections on this ubiquitous masterwork. Modified classical instruments, scribbled musical notations, Nazi concerts, historical Turkish musical groups, the pope, Communist propaganda and other archival images are used to great effect.

Venerable American Conceptualist Elaine Sturtevant has built a 40-year career with her copies of other artists' work. Fittingly, this clothbound artist's book with marbled paper draws upon Jorge Luis Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, an account--which indistinguishably blurs fact and fiction--of a translator who "re-creates" Cervantes' classic novel.

This volume explores artistic representation of today's increasingly precarious work and social spheres within advanced economies. It features work by Los Carpinteros, Julian Rosefeldt, Allan Sekula and Andreas Siekmann, among others.

Omer Fast's video installation The Casting is based on interviews held with a U.S. Army sergeant before his renewed deployment in Iraq. Fast describes the project thus: "During several days he told me two stories which I have interwoven. The first took place in Bavaria and describes the sergeant's relationship with a German girl who loves speed and self-mutilation. The second story takes place outside Baghdad and deals with a bomb on the roadside and a tragic mistake." Fast took these two stories and processed them into a screenplay, which he then had interpreted by actors as a series of silent tableaux. This succinct volume documents these tableaux with numerous color photographs and includes a conversation between the artist and Sven Lütticken, as well as a text by Matthias Michalka.

Tidal flooding has long threatened the Venetian lagoon, a danger that the high-tech MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico) project was founded to address. This volume collects photographs taken by Walter Niedermayr in 2008 of the lagoons and islands affected by the new system, captured with his characteristic use of dazzling light.

Formed in 1993, the Austrian artist collective Gelitin is famed for its participatory works and events, which have followed somewhat in the tradition of Relational Aesthetics. This artist's book, done in the style of a children's book, marks a new development in their activities--not as an artist's book (of which they have produced several), nor as an irreverent, deadpan gesture of humor (ditto), but as a new take on the children's book. Not quite for children, Boring Island recounts the collective's 30-day adventure on a small island: "there were animals, hunger, wind, waves, the sun blazed, it was stormy, and endlessly boring." The book describes Gelitin's adventures (or "boring" lack of adventures) in diaristic form, and is illustrated throughout with cartoonish watercolor drawings.

Working with plaster, cement, plastics, wood and textiles, British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (born 1944) explores simple physical tensions of materials as well as their more architectural properties. Coming on the heels of her acclaimed show at the New Museum in New York, this volume is the most substantial monograph yet published on Barlow.

This sophisticated artist's book, with custom-cut cover and partially exposed binding, documents John Bock's 2006 action, "Maltreated Frigate"--the height as well as the culmination of this rising German artist's performative work. Here, Bock's vision comes to life in a multitude of color illustrations composed and collaged by the artist. The libretto, printed in its entirety, explodes in linguistic fireworks and tumbles down the printed page, solid in its earthiness and ready to be constructed into a jumble of bizarre and whimsical neologisms--vivid testimony to the artist's zest for expression. "Maltreated Frigate" was performed as a spectacle in 10 scenes, a collision course of rock opera, Theater of the Absurd, animated sculpture and puppet show. This raucous volume invites the reader to accompany the artist and his protagonists along their tour-de-force, stream-of-consciousness action. It is a violent ride on a machine from hell, steered by an idiosyncratic inner logic.

Curator Mike Meiré designed and produced this amazing installation/performance space/working farm kitchen--featuring everything from a lamb pen to major appliances to feast equipment--for Skulptur Projekte Münster 07. It celebrated the quintessential site of living, making and sensuality; a site between functionality and emotion; a site of creation.

This volume unites all 16 of the gorgeous, monumental abstract paintings that constitute this respected British artist's Four Quartets series (2001-07), along with related gouaches on paper. Martin Caiger-Smith's text explores parallels with T.S. Eliot's cycle of poems of the same name, as well as McKeever's wider oeuvre.

During his long and illustrious career as a curator, Gerald Matt, the current Director of Kunsthalle Vienna, had many insightful conversations with the top artists of the day. Gathered here are 40 interviews with contemporary artists including Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, Candice Breitz, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, Raymond Pettibon, Santiago Sierra, Francesco Vezzoli and Yang Fudong, among others, accompanied by numerous color illustrations of each artist's work. According to Matt, "The interviews gathered together in this volume attempt to provide a panoramic overview of contemporary artistic production modes without demystifying the aesthetic puzzle with hasty answers. The point here is not to exhibit shut and dried views of the world but to sketch open systems that admit some space for continuing discourse. Allow yourself to be carried forward by the flow of words without expecting exhaustive help for your life. Entirely in keeping with the motto that Raymond Pettibon wrote on one of his drawings: 'Whatever you are looking for, you won't find it here.'"

This publication documents a group show that explores the relationship between productivity and creativity. Various artists--including Claire Fontaine, Thomas Baumann, Siggi Hofer, Santiago Sierra, Josephine Pryde, Christoph Meier and Adrian Williams--comment on the conflation of time and money.

Album III is the book version of Luis Jacob's installation for 2007's Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. The project consists of hundreds of images found and copied from various books, magazines and other publications, as well as the Internet. This exhaustive volume is 160 pages long and minimally designed, with only two to five images on a page--no text, no descriptions. The images speak for themselves. Coming from public sources, the pictures are grouped on each page formally, conceptually and intuitively, so that, for example, on a given page one might find a grainy black-and-white photograph of a pile of sausages in a butcher's window next to a saturated color image of a boxer's punching bag. The reader is invited to make his or her own associations and invent narratives through these visual puns. Sometimes humorous, sometimes bland and even sometimes devastating, this museum of found photography incorporates images that span from the early twentieth century to today. Luis Jacob was born in 1970 in Peru. Currently, he lives and works as an artist, writer, curator and educator in Toronto.

This collection of art-historic, psychoanalytic and linguistic essays ponders the relationship between post-conceptual art practice and the legacy of Roland Barthes's famed A Lover's Discourse: Fragments--specifically, Barthes's assertion that love can be a critical "medium" in politically turbulent times. With select artworks.

This limited-edition facsimile documents On Kawara's (1932-2014) Pure Consciousness series, in which he created a new picture every day from January 1 to 7, 1997. The booklets accompanying their exhibition, with installation photos and texts by the artist, are extremely rare; it is reproduced for this publication and packaged in a box designed by Kawara.

The photographs and films of Croatian artist Slavica Perkovic (born 1959) conflate events in her own life with imagined characters and scenarios. The Vertigo project began in 1995, inspired by Hitchcock's film and a lengthy stay in San Francisco. Perkovic visited locations in Vertigo and produced a video work which this volume documents.

This attractive artist's book presents a "guide" to works produced by Slovakian Conceptual artist Roman Ondák (born 1966) from 2007 to 2011. Organized by the city in which it was presented, each work is represented by photographic documentation and a brief description by a curator, journalist or fellow artist.

Hans-Peter Feldmann's idiosyncratic field research investigates the momentum of human perception and the processing of images. This tight collection includes found images of an erupting volcano, a red-eyed ape, a competitive swimmer and celebrity shoes, among others--all taken from journalistic sources.

This spiral-bound, scrapbook-style guide to the half-century career of Turkish sculptor Füsun Onur (born 1938) reproduces more than 200 pages of photo documentation from the artist's personal albums. Onur's sculptures range from minimalist abstraction to assemblage incorporating furniture and fabric.

Mimicking an architectural almanac of the nineteenth century, artist Pablo Bronstein presents the Postmodern architecture of London. Each building is described by a drawing and text by the artist. The book is based on the guided bus tours Bronstein conducted as an official project for the visitors of the 2006 Frieze Art Fair.

Performance artist, sculptor, prankster, restauranteur, farmer, professional poker player and frontman of the 1980s Swiss electronic pop duo Yello, Dieter Meier (born 1945) brings a contagious sense of fun and lightness to all of his diverse activities. At Documenta 5, in 1972, Meier installed a commemorative plaque at the Kassel train station that read: "On 23 March 1994, from 3 to 4 pm, Dieter Meier will stand on this plaque." He honored the promise, and in the interim produced enough bodies of work for at least five artists: ephemeral junk sculptures, street performances, films and videos, books and, most famously, music, as one half of Yello. With international top ten singles such as "The Race" and "Oh Yeah," Yello has been one of the most influential and widely sampled electronica groups of the 1980s. This spectacular monograph celebrates Meier's many lives, from the late 1960s to the present, and includes a DVD of his early films, plus Yello music videos.